Australia's peak actuarial body has asked the government to investigate the country's incredibly high 13% excess death rate in 2022.
What Happened: An analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics ABS data by the Actuaries Institute shows that an additional 15,400 people died in the first eight months of the year.
Actuaries said that number includes around one-third of those with no link to COVID- 19.
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Karen Cutter, spokeswoman for the institute's Covid 19 Mortality Working Group, said 13% was an incredibly high number for mortality.
Mortality doesn't normally vary by more than 1 to 2%, so 13% is way higher than normal levels, she said.
I'm not aware of anything comparable in the recent past, but I haven't looked at it. They talk about the flu season of 2017 being really bad, and the mortality there was 1% higher than normal. She said that it's well outside the range of normal.
Australia's latest mortality data released in November showed that there had been 128,797 deaths from Jan. 1 to Aug. 31, which was 17% higher than the historical average.
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